![]() Compared to a universal digital quantum computer, the resources required for experimental boson sampling appear much less demanding. The possibility to generate many photons, evolve them under a large linear optical unitary transformation, then detect them, seems feasible, so the role of a boson sampling machine as a rudimentary but legitimate computing device is particularly appealing. The advent of integrated quantum photonics 10 has enabled large, complex, stable and programmable optical circuitry 11, 12, while recent advances in photon generation 13, 14, 15 and detection 16, 17 have also been impressive. However, it is not yet experimentally proven that a large computationally useful quantum system can be assembled, and such a task is highly non-trivial given the challenge of overcoming the effects of errors in these systems.īoson sampling is a simple task which is native to linear optics and has captured the imagination of quantum scientists because it seems possible that the anticipated supremacy of quantum machines could be demonstrated by a near-term experiment. Recent large state and private investments in developing quantum technologies have increased interest in this challenge. It is believed that new types of computing machines will be constructed to exploit quantum mechanics for an exponential speed advantage in solving certain problems compared with classical computers 9. Compared to current experiments, a demonstration of quantum supremacy over a successful implementation of these classical methods on a supercomputer would require the number of photons and experimental components to increase by orders of magnitude, while tackling exponentially scaling photon loss. Our classical algorithm, based on Metropolised independence sampling, allowed the boson sampling problem to be solved for 30 photons with standard computing hardware. Here we present classical boson sampling algorithms and theoretical analyses of prospects for scaling boson sampling experiments, showing that near-term quantum supremacy via boson sampling is unlikely. ![]() The apparently low resource requirements for large boson sampling experiments have raised expectations of a near-term demonstration of quantum supremacy by boson sampling 7, 8. ![]() Photon statistics are governed by intractable matrix functions, which suggests that sampling from the distribution obtained by injecting photons into a linear optical network could be solved more quickly by a photonic experiment than by a classical computer. Boson sampling 1 is a rudimentary quantum algorithm tailored to the platform of linear optics, which has sparked interest as a rapid way to demonstrate such quantum supremacy 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. However, large-scale universal quantum computers are yet to be built. It is predicted that quantum computers will dramatically outperform their conventional counterparts.
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